And There He Kept Her (Ben Packard #1)(44)

She set aside the magazine in her lap and took the food from him. She was still shackled to the wall, able to sit up and stand but unable to move more than a foot or so from the bed. The lamp in the corner was on a timer now—on from eight in the morning until nine at night—and far enough away that she couldn’t reach it if she tried.

“What are you reading?” he asked.

“I’m mostly just turning pages,” she said, picking up peas and bits of carrot one at a time and putting them in her mouth. “I’m having a hard time…tracking what I’m reading. My vision is blurry. I don’t know if it’s the pills or my blood sugar.”

“The pills will fog your head for sure.” The best part of giving her pills for her pain was an end to all the moaning and sobbing. That alone made it easier for him to spend more time in the basement and talk to her through the open door as he did other things.

“I’ve been trying to read this interview with some guy named Gore Vidal.”

“Who is Gore Vidal?”

She shrugged. “An author of some kind. He had a lot of opinions on politics and AIDS in”—she paused to flip back to the cover and look at the magazine’s date—“in 1987,” she said.

“Those magazines aren’t for kids. I’ll find you something else.”

For a minute she was completely focused on peeling the skin off the chicken. Before she bit into the leg, he saw her spit something into her hand and place it next to her where he couldn’t see it.

“What was that?”

She held up a plastic thing shaped like the roof of her mouth with a wire around the front of it. It was clear and pink and looked like something that would live in a coral reef. “It’s my retainer. I usually take it out before you bring the food. The pills…I forgot.”

She ate the chicken and looked like she enjoyed the change in the menu. Emmett asked her what else she liked to read. “I mostly listen to audiobooks on my phone,” she said. “We’re reading David Copperfield in my AP English class. I guess I’d like to know how that turns out.”

Emmett didn’t know what an audiobook was or how you listened to one on a phone. It sounded like nonsense to him. “Is David Copperfield in that backpack?”

She shook her head. “That’s Jesse’s bag. He wouldn’t have a copy since the seniors aren’t reading it. Maybe there’s something else in there. You could probably get David Copperfield at the library.”

Emmett left her to finish her food. The blue backpack was sitting on the workbench where Carl had set it the first day after bringing it in from the car. Emmett unzipped it and saw a textbook and a spiral notebook inside. The pocket in front was so full it was hard to pull back the zipper. He took everything out: pens, gum, a pack of cigarettes with a lighter tucked inside, a small wad of bills held together with a binder clip. A metal can of breath mints had tiny plastic bags inside with individual pills in each bag.

Emmett lit one of the boy’s cigarettes, a better brand than he smoked. He recognized some of the pills in the tiny bags as ones he took. Others were a mystery without any marks or a label to identify them. Did they really sell a pill at a time? For how much? Seemed like a lot of trouble to individually wrap them.

He took the textbook and the notebook out of the bag and saw something glowing in the very bottom. He reached in again and pulled out a black cell phone.

“Sonofabitch,” he said.

***

He set the backpack on the bed next to her. “Open it up,” he said.

He watched her set aside the plate and make space on the blanket between her legs. She pulled the zipper around the U-shaped top, then grabbed the backpack by the bottom and dumped it toward her. He walked out of the room before everything slid out. When he came back after making a loop of the basement, she had the textbook in her lap. It said CHEMISTRY in huge letters over a picture of a test tube with red liquid inside being heated over a blue flame. She put her hand on the cover and stared at it like she was seeing something other than what it was.

“Is that what you wanted?”

She shrugged.

“Looks less interesting than Gore Vidal,” he said.

She blinked a couple of times and set the book aside. “Jesse and I met in chemistry class. He failed it last year and had to take it again. The teacher assigned us as lab partners.”

Emmett grunted. “You two should have done more studying and less robbing.”

“We never robbed anyone before. I tried to talk him out of coming here. I told him there’s other ways of earning money, but he said it wasn’t about money.”

“It was about stealing my pills.”

“It was about protecting his sister. Sam threatened that something would happen to Jesse’s sister if he didn’t get your pills. Jesse was willing to do anything to pay Sam the money he owed, but Sam wanted the pills. Jesse had never done anything like this before. I swear. He was scared to go up those stairs.”

Emmett grunted. “You were only thinking about yourselves. Not one thought about me or what I would do without my pills,” he said as he carried out the toilet bucket.

Back in the room, he smoked and watched the girl finish her food. She put the peas and carrots in her mouth one at a time. It reminded him of watching a squirrel eat.

“Were you ever married?” she asked after a minute.